Page:Swedenborg's Doctrine of Correspondence.djvu/154

148 "The Divine Nature is not susceptible of evil; wherefore, that He might overcome evil by His own proper strength, which no man could or ever can do, and that thus He might become Justice, He willed to be born as another man. Otherwise there was no need that He should be born; for He might have assumed the human essence without birth, as formerly He had occasionally done when He appeared to the Most Ancient Church, and likewise to the Prophets." This was by filling an angel with His Divine, or taking on His own in the angel, and thus the angelic form, in which He could manifest Himself and through which He could speak. But redemption involved a combat with evil and necessitated the assumption of the organic human forms of the external man in which it inhered. Therefore, "in order that He might put on evil, to fight against it and to conquer it and that He might thus at the same time join together in Himself the Divine essence and the human essence, He came into the world." "The battle of the Omnipotent God was with the hells, upon which battle He could not have entered unless He had before put on the human. But